Ela frowned speculatively. “Let’s not say nothing.”
“I’d imagine falling in love with a rock would be a stretch, even for you.”
“Nothing wrong with stretching.” She winked.
I bit back a retort, took a long swig of my wine instead, waited until the draught had snaked all the way down into my stomach before responding. “Do you want to hear the end of the story, or not?”
The musicians had packed up early, but a few determined revelers remained on the deck, sprawled around tables in groups of two or three. Two tables over, a young couple was bickering—he kept taking her hand, and she kept pulling it away angrily, holding it close, then laying it on the table all over again, as though it were bait. Past them, a very fat, very drunk man was singing listlessly, transforming a lively dance tune into a dirge. Most of the servingmen had started stacking chairs and mopping the deck, although no one had bothered us yet.
“No,” Ela replied finally. “Not tonight.”
The words took me by surprise. “Half a heartbeat ago, you complained that I was hiding the whole thing.”
“Oh, I like hiding.” She drained her glass of wine, locking eyes with me over the rim the whole time. “If no one’s hiding anything, then what is there to find?”
I shook my head, suddenly baffled. “I need to go to bed.”
Ela rolled her eyes. “You slept all day.” She glanced over at the bare-chested young man who had been taking care of us. “And Triem won’t be done working for ages.”
“I have to go to bed,” I said again, standing up unsteadily. “I need to be ready tomorrow.”
“Oh?” The priestess raised an eyebrow. “Ready for what, may I ask?”
“Ready to kill someone.”
6
Hitting things and drinking things seemed to be the Neck’s central activities.
I knew that the enormous soldier was called the Neck because every time he slammed another wooden tankard down on the table, the other men seated around him—soldiers under his command—would chant, “The. Neck. The. Neck. THE! NECK!”
It wasn’t hard to see how he came by the name; the Neck’s neck was a column of flesh dropping straight from his ears onto the foundation of his massive shoulders. Tattoos climbed from the open collar of his legionary uniform, thorny vines and twisted barbs mostly, although an unsteadily inked woman sprawled across his jugular, naked, legs spread as though she were trying—very implausibly—to derive some pleasure from that bulging artery. The rest of the bastard was every bit as big as that neck, as though someone had cobbled him together out of huge slabs of flesh without much regard for the skeletal anatomy beneath.
The Neck didn’t chant. Instead, whenever the chorus of cheers around him rose to a pitch, he would pound on whatever was nearby: the table, his knee, the shoulder of a companion, as though insisting on both his drunkenness and his levity.
I didn’t believe in either.
Certainly, he’d consumed an impressive amount of beer in the time I’d been watching him, but though he swayed in his chair, the sway wasn’t quite right. It looked like something rehearsed, performed. And his eyes—instead of stuttering in the way of the truly drunk, they remained steady. He seemed to be paying attention to nothing beyond the beer and the other men at his table, but his gaze never stopped moving, panning quickly and calmly over the room. Whenever the door opened, the Neck glanced over, the movement so quick that I wouldn’t have noticed if I hadn’t been watching.
There’s a common misconception that big men are stupid. I’ve heard dozens of explanations: all that muscle steals blood from the brain; their heads are broken from getting into so many fights; they’ve just never needed to be shrewd. In plays, they’re usually depicted as comic brutes, in literature as willing idiots of slighter, brighter human beings. It’s as though our basic sense of fairness is offended by the idea that the same person could be both intellectually and physically formidable. There should, we think, be some sort of trade: the poor in wealth should be rich in spirit, the homely more noble than the beautiful. It doesn’t work that way. Fairness and justice have never interested the goddess of birth. Bedisa bestows her blessings arbitrarily, showering one person with health, strength, wisdom, denying the next the basic comfort of an unbent spine. It is not until death that we are finally made equal.
Of course, the Neck wasn’t dead yet—that was my job—and to my great inconvenience, he was starting to look like one of those upon whom Bedisa had lavished her most expansive gifts. I glanced at the other men around him—soldiers from his legion, judging from the insignia on the Annurian uniforms. It would have been easier to kill one of them. In fact, it might well have been easier to kill all of them. They were young, obviously strong from years marching and fighting down in the Waist, but unlike the Neck they were built on a human scale. Their necks looked like bundles of spine and esophagus, windpipe and nerve, rather than architectural features. They also looked nervous.
They did their best to hide it, of course, laughing too loud and clapping one another on the shoulder, pointedly ignoring the other patrons, local folks who sat in loose knots around the tavern’s circular tables, their faces barely illuminated by the low light of the red-scale lanterns above. A few of the soldiers were trying to go tankard to tankard with the Neck, although, judging from the slur in their song and the stagger in their step, they lacked their commander’s stomach for ale. Even half a barrel of that ale, however, couldn’t hide the wary glances, the way their hands kept reaching, as though of their own accord, to the swords and knives belted at their waists. When someone dropped a clay mug over by the bar, even the drunkest of the soldiers lurched halfway to his feet, as though expecting to fight.
I had set the stage for that skittishness, of course, at least partially. In the centuries since conquering Dombang, Annur had insisted that the city was part of a peaceful and unified whole, as though it were all as easy as signing a few treaties and lifting old tariffs. The world tends to be more stubborn than that.